In this first part, we will focus on four decades of film music scores from the Fabulous Fifties to 1980—technically, it is still the Subversive Seventies.

SPECIFICATIONS: THE CRITERIA ARE BASED ON THE FOLLOWING AXIOMS: THE RICHNESS OF THE ORIGINAL RECORDING, THE INTEGRITY OF THE INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC, THE LEVEL OF INNOVATION, THE PACE OF THE CORPUS, THE ELEMENT OF SURPRISE, THE COLOR OF THE INSTRUMENTS USE, THE CROSS-REFERENCES.

VINTAGE SELECTION PER DECADE

All soundtracks are classified in the alphabetical order of the composers. LN means “Liner Notes” and they include authors dealing with cinema/tv and music analysis, track-by-track commentary, vintage LP notes, technical talk.

Men in War is a reissue of a previous LP. The militaristic music works fine (see the fast-paced start and ending of “Sounds of War”), even the old-fashioned manly patriotic song played twice (“Men in War Theme” and “Salute to Heroes”) and the obsessive pace that encapsulates the quest of the soldiers. Beyond the obvious, you discover tragic and sentimental phrases. The tracks “Forest of Mines” and “The Last March” feature a superb proto-The Twilight Zone passage with a dreamlike use of harp that begin from 00:41 to 00:58 for the first and from 01:33 to 01:44 for the second. It’s a war score template.

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City of Fear is an early score by the composer: dated 1959. And it’s a little pebble for the collectors of Goldsmith’s first period. You have got all the elements of his original signature: Bartok and Stravinsky integrated into jazz crime. All these components give a foretaste of The Twilight Zone in “Road Block” (see “Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room”) and “Tennis Shoes”/“The Shoes” (see “Jazz Theme #1”, “Jazz Theme #2”), The Prize, The Vulcan Affair and The Satan Bug. The poor recording suffers from a wealth of noise and the soundtrack contains two music and effects-only tracks (“Motel” and the last seconds of “The Search”) as in the archival edition of The Satan Bug. It’s a blind buy for modernist listeners.

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Bernard Herrmann at 20th Century Fox has a majority (thirteen) of 1950’s scores with four 1940’s scores and one 1960’s score. The main attraction is the inclusion of Hangover Square (1945). I can’t say anything at this stage.

The Knack is a reissue of a previous CD edition from Ryko but without the dialogues snippets: what a relief. It’s not the original recording but a simple album. It features one song not used in the finished film. The score has some jazz arrangements as in Thunderball and The Ipcress File but it is very Swinging Sixties pop music-oriented due to the organ and it has the warm and horny female hummings. Nevertheless, it still is a pleasant musical experience.

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This is Kritzerland’s greatest Bernstein release! Summer and Smoke is a dense, versatile, tragic, delicate and sentimental score with a reference to an Igor Stravinsky’s hypnotical cue entitled “Ritual of the Ancestors” from The Rite of Spring (from 00:26 to 00:39) and and even recalls Alex North’s love theme for Spartacus (from 03:46 to 03:59 and from 04:14 to 04:31): see “John’s Patient”. Echoes of The Great Escape lies in sections of “Prelude”. My favourite track remains “Rosa Enters” because of the strangely poetic leaning that comes back in a brief passage of the next track “John Comes Home/Changed Decision/Hat Snatcher” from 01:33 to 01:56. Unlike Men in War, the CD of Summer and Smoke contains the original recording and the album version.

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As at the end of 2010 with Patton, I bought another WWII title that I already got from a previous edition (Varèse Sarabande, 2004): The Great Escape which is part of the composer’s three masterpieces along with The Man with the Golden Arm and The Magnificent Seven. On the whole, it’s a fine set to get. The notes—I like how Redman describes the music of Bernstein: “His music could wrap around the images like a bathrobe clinging to a beautiful woman—it was warm, it was sensual, it was physical. It was the perfect fit”—and the art direction are real nice: I especially like the cue assembly on page 15. Note that the list of musicians is part of the booklet and that 3-CD set contains the original recording and the album version.

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Robinson Crusoe on Mars is a long and dreamlike lament derived from two Twilight Zone episodes (“Perchance to Dream” and “A World of Difference”: especially the cues with a bold brass section) and dominated by two supernatural organs. The heroic main title is vibrant and intense. Note that the orchestrations are by the composer and Fred Steiner, another Twilight Zone alumnus, who contributes to eighteen tracks. The music has a thick 50’s B-movie feel attached to it: anachronistic Golden Age into the modern Silver Age.

After last year’s The Deep, find another big Barry by Intrada: The Black Hole which is an outgrowth of a James Bond score between the ethereal sides of You Only Live Twice and Moonraker: see “Main Title”, “That’s It” and “Zero Gravity”. I think it is a masterpiece of a rare beauty. You can skip the few brassy patriotic tracks as “Overture”, “Laser” and a cue inside “Kate’s OK”. The cream of the crop remains the five ominous, suspenseful and downbeat tracks: “Durant is Dead”, “Kate’s OK”, “Hot and Heavy”, “Meteorites” and “Hotter and Heavier”. The liner notes by James—sorry—Jeff Bond are fabulous because we get a real music analysis of the tracks: too bad, no list of musicians is provided. The release of this score used to be a tough task owing to the old-fashioned up-to-date technology used back then.

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As each year, I selected one title by pianist-composer Roy Budd for the sound quality: The Stone Killer is a highly enjoyable funky dynamite score with one unnessary soul music song “Black is Beautiful” with no singer credits and some source music (“Jazz Source” written in the same clothe as “Black is Beautiful” because of an electric piano, “Cool Bossa Source”) and one intimistic jazz track (the piano-oriented “In the Shadows”). The tracklisting is plagued by the abscence of scene titles and only contains the production codes like “M (sk)”. The central motif is found in “Main Titles” and “M5 (sk 6)”. Some of the best tracks remain the fast-paced and heavy action-packed “M7 (sk 10)”, “M1 (sk 10)”, “M5 (sk 10)” or the moody urban pieces as “M3 (sk1)” and “M5 (sk7)”. Diamonds is the minor score of this double header that suffers from too many insipid popular songs by The Three Degrees: a total of 5 songs. Nevertheless some tracks shine as the fast-paced and sneaky thief motif in “The Thief”, “Diamond Fortress”, “Thief on the Prowl”, two cues inside “A Handful of Gems”, the raw funk “Beauty and the Bass”, the versatile “I think I’m Being Followed” with its two changes of pace and the semi-avant garde “Robbery!” at 00:20. The score is also flavored with a heavy Middle East folklore and some jazz cues inside tracks (see “Crown Jewels”).

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The Kremlin Letter is an outgrowth of two Cold War scores for Mission: Impossible: the first one is the season 3 “The Play” (aired: August 12, 1968) with its Slavic flavor (cimbalom galore) and the last one is the season 5 “My Friend, My Enemy” (aired: October 25, 1970) with its tormented leaning. The flavor of “The Play” lies in the tracks “Main Title”, “Cell Aberration”, the cue “The Puppet Mill”, “A Delicate Position”, the cue “Tumble Down Lorry”, “Mince Street”, “The File on Rone”, the cue “The Unraveling”, “Too Late, The Hero”, the cue “The Not So Tender Trap”, “The Kremlin Players”. The mark of “My Friend, My Enemy” is found in the tracks “Erika Leaves The Dinner”, the cue “Love Mike”, the cue “Love’s Labour Lost”, the cue “Erika’s Eroica”, the cue “The Not So Tender Trap”, “Acid to Acid”, “My Love, The Prisoner”. I invite you to watch these two episodes to understand the genesis of The Kremlin Letter. You have some easy listening stuff as “Samba Con Pollo”, “San Francisco Cabaret”. You can also pinpoint the arrangements of a season 1 score from The Wild Wild West entitled “The Night of the Deadly Bed” (aired: September 24, 1965) in the tracks: “Mexican Scuffle” (a Mariarchi-flavored track), “Cat On a White Roof”, “My Love, The Prisoner”. Note that the score is the complete creation of one man (Robert Drasnin) who composes, orchestrates and conducts the music. Unfortunately, the list of musicians is absent from that edition.

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Pretty Maids All in a Row is a minor but sympathetic and addictive score because of its nature: source music (see, among other things, the Salsa “Campus Pop Source”, the two “Tiger Source”, the two “Radio Source”, the two “Miss Smith’s Apartment”). Apart from the popular and dated songs (“Chilly Winds” performed by The Osmonds: see track #1, #15, #16, #17) that you can skip, the incidental music contains a selection of moody pieces: the intimistic and troubled “Ponce”, some tracks remind the arrangements of Dirty Harry: see the start of “Jean/Chilly Winds” (#4), “Check Your Queen” (#7) , the superb laid-back and sensual “Pussycat”-like “Tiger Source—Continued”, the dead serious slow-moving gloomy and suspenseful “Yvonne/The Other Tiger/Lecture on Love”, “Is He Gone?/So Long, Honey” and “Tiger Fini/In Memoriam” (with sudden outbursts of unbridled psychedelic avant garde at 00:55 as in The Venetian Affair) dominated by a subdued Yamaha E-3 organ already used in THX 1138 (1970) and Earth II (1971). As expected, find Schifrin’s orchestrator for his Silver Age era: composer Richard Hazard (see his input on Bullitt, Kelly’s Heroes, Telefon and his scores for Mannix and Mission: Impossible). In the booklet, we learnt that many composers were first asked to write the music: Mr. Pussycat aka Burt Bacharach, Jerry Fielding, Fred Karlin.

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Harry in your Pocket is a pivotal score and one of Schifrin’s best collaboration with a creator (Bruce Geller: see Mission: Impossible, Mannix, Hunter, Bronk) in Hollywood. Schifrin goes back to his 60’s mode to evoke the anachronistic style of these fancy gentlemen pickpockets as if Geller asks him to make references to the British heist film that he worships so much: The League of Gentlemen. The Baroque (see the harpsichord use from Marquis de Sade in the tracks “Training Sequence” that borrows a brass motif from “The Wig”, “I’ll Make it Someday”, “Not a Bad Move”) and lean jazz-oriented score is first intimistic and delicate (see the main title “Day by Day by Day”) and also a patchwork of past assignments like Coogan’s Bluff and Dirty Harry for the Eastern Indians percussions (see “Let’s Fix That”, “Welcome to Victoria”, “The Wallet”, “Handcuffed”) and Braddock/Cool Hand Luke for the news theme from “Main Title” and “Tar Sequence” (see “Not Retail”, “Training Sequence”, “Let’s Fix That”, “Welcome to Victoria”, “I’ll Make it Someday”) and the high melodramatic tail of “End Title” that you find in “The Wallet”. There is even a certain degree of bitter sweetness a la Michel Legrand: see “Ferryboat Sequence”. Olivier Messiaen’s mystical influence is present in the use of the bells: see “Not a Bad Move”. It contains some source music: see “Penthouse Source”, the two “Restaurant Source” and “Loud Radio”. Schifrin performs predominantly piano. The melancholy of the overall music can be connected to The Fox. And the cherry on top of the cake: we get the original tune entitled “Day by Day by Day” performed by Josh Adams and written by Bruce Geller who previously gave two songs (“Bet It Up Boys” and “Ten Tiny Toes” performed by Barbara Eden for the two-parter episode “Damon’s Road”) for Rawhide and two (”Buy my Glass of Wine” and “The Lady ‘Bove the Bar” performed by Barbara Bain for the episode “Illusion” which also includes the previous “Ten Tiny Toes”) for Mission: Impossible. The track of the song was absent from Schifrin’s archive so the producer had to exploit the music stem. This release is first-rate and poignant and it represents the best of the three Schifrin CD’s that I bought in 2011. Highly recommended. And don’t forget Harry’s rules: “We travel first class, best rooms, best clothes, best food. Everything strictly the best”. And above all, Harry’s law: “Harry never holds. Not for a minute, not for thirty seconds.”

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Telefon is the second part of a triptych between actor Charles Bronson and composer Lalo Schifrin that started with St. Ives and will end up with Love and Bullets. It also closes his relationship with director Don Siegel after four films: Coogan’s Bluff, The Beguiled, Dirty Harry, Charley Varrick. Here, Schifrin writes another variation on his People’s Republic sound from the mid-60’s. After Robert Drasnin’s The Kremlin Letter, find another cimbalom/balalaika-oriented score. The arch fast-paced action-packed track by excellence is “Callender” which reminds Charley Varrick. Note that the orchestration of the music is not only by the composer but by Richard Hazard who also contributes to many famous scores (ibidem). Telefon, as we can figure it out, borrows a lot from the composer’s past assignments: from Mission: Impossible (season 1 scores), Charley Varrick, Planet of the Apes: The Series to Skyriders.

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“There’re no winners in a game of loosers.”—Pianist Tommy Joyce (actor Murphy Dunne) playing at the Oriental Lounge in The Big Bus.

The Big Bus is an amusing and unpretentious composite score: good escapism with multiple directions. Shire makes veiled references to previous scores as The Conversation (see the piano start of “Claude & Sybil”) and The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three (see the hectic “The Big Fight” orchestrated by Greig McRitchie aka one of Jerry Fielding’s sidekicks). The Main Title is injected in many tracks (the super groovy action-packed “Breaking Wind Montage”, “Dusk Drive By” and “Harbinger Curve” all containing a guitar playing with a wah wah pedal) as a leitmotiv.

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Audrey Rose contains Small’s Klute moody musical techniques executed by the slow and hypnotic piano from track #2 (“Hoover in Rain/Door Chain/Janice Bed to Street”). The musical direction is a quote of Jerry Goldsmith’s The Other owing to its macabre enfantina and it’s filled with high rise of avant garde and dissonances: see “Top of Stairs”, “Through Window”, “Last Seizure”. The main title is the only optimistic piece of music inside this tense experimental modernistic soundtrack. A bunch of kids sing a winter rhyme in “Fire”. It’s highly recommended for Klute aficionados.

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After last year’s Family Plot, find another big Williams: Midway is a solid war score that sounds like a Goldsmith’s locomotive. It’s his second one after None but the Brave. The main title is perfect because of its lowkey snare drum. Some of the tracks foreshadow the insidious side of Black Sunday: see the obsessive leitmotif in “Strawberry 5”. The last three patriotic tracks (“End Credits”, “The Men of the Yorktown March”, “Midway March”) are proto-versions of some Superman incidental music. Recommended.

Funeral Home doesn’t really sound like a standard horror score. Hopefully, the composer’s musical trade mark is still intact despite the new decade. Fielding’s ultimate work remains faithful to his musical standards. Some of the tracks remind the composer’s previous commissions conceived as a farewell potpourri: Straw Dogs in “Whispering Corridors” - “You Like The Way I Look” (featuring the laughing trombones from Advise and Consent) - “Voices in the Basement” and “Billy’s Demise”, The Killer Elite in “The Cat”, The Outlaw Josey Wales in “Going, Going ... Gone”, Gray Lady Down in “Water Rescue” and the country side of The Outfit (Cf. “Her Mamma Passed Away”) or The Killer Elite (Cf. “Mack’s Garage”) combined with The Getaway (Cf. “Benyon’s World”) in “Not Quite Country”. In the inlay, we discover the orchestrators of the music: Fielding and his usual partner Lennie Niehaus (without Greig McRitchie). And the music editor is Dan Carlin who used to start with Fielding from The Getaway. As most available work by the composer, it’s a must have.

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Hide in Plain Sight is a good and brief Rosenman score that fills up and ends up nicely this double header started with Telefon. The music is typical of his past commissions from the Silver Age. We learn from the booklet that composer Michael Small was first selected to do the task and that actor-director James Caan refused any music for his film. The score is divided in three categories: action-driven (“Untouchables”), sentimental (“Flipper”, “Let’s Go”, “Maz’s Car” and “Finale”) and lowkey atonal (“Followed on the Freeway”, “Tom Hides”, “Trailer” and “Teaser”).

I've always wrestled with when a decade ends and another begins outside of looking at a calendar, and I've long considered 1980 the '70s, just like the 1960s last up until about 1973...that'll teach me to file pop culture in little boxes. ;)

"Subversive '70s" indeed! It's practically an act of war to post about anything from that decade here these days. :D

While I refrained from buying anything in 2011, it's still got some titles I "need" to get. Telefon, Harry in Your Pocket, and Funeral Home among them.

SPECIFICATIONS: THE CRITERIA ARE BASED ON THE FOLLOWING AXIOMS: THE RICHNESS OF THE ORIGINAL RECORDING, THE INTEGRITY OF THE INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC, THE LEVEL OF INNOVATION, THE PACE OF THE CORPUS, THE ELEMENT OF SURPRISE, THE COLOR OF THE INSTRUMENTS USE, THE CROSS-REFERENCES.

While agreeing with your overall focus, Mr. Rucki, that the finest film music compositions occurred during the 1950s, 1960s, & 1970s, I'm interested in learning about why a number of soundtrack albums released during 2011 (which contain scores from these decades) fail to appear on your list regarding the criteria you've specified.

For example, "Summer And Smoke" is my favorite Elmer Bernstein soundtrack, and "Men In War" is amongst my 'top 5' Bernstein scores. Naturally, I agree with what you had written about these titles. However, Kritzerland also re-issued the LP programs of Bernstein's "Drango" and "Kings Go Forth", as well as offering us 2 other items of prime Bernstein never before released: "Fear Strikes Out" with "The Tin Star". Is the reason why these other titles don't appear within your article because you have an issue (or issues) with these sound recordings, or the integrity of the music or the instrumental colors?

Kritzerland also released CDs of others with similar vintage, like Alfred Newman's "The Counterfeit Traitor" and "Black Sunday" by Les Baxter. Should readers of your article deduce that the omission of Newman's "Traitor" is due to its lack of innovation according to the criteria?

"Robinson Crusoe On Mars" by Van Cleave gets highlighted in the article; yet, 2 more of Van Cleave's soundtracks received premieres during 2011 (and by FSM as well) without a mention of either of them in the 1950s category. What about the 3 CDs from the MMM label, which offer significant contributions to the discographies of Heinz Roemheld and Herschel Burke Gilbert?

So far, only Hollywood movies and American composers have been mentioned. Without doubt, there's other notable 2011 CDs deserving of citation, but they may be absent from the article due to the CDs being produced outside of the U.S.A. and/or them being soundtracks from non-English language cinema.

An "element of surprise" awaits those folks uninitiated with the film music of Piero Piccioni, for example. Whether scoring Francesco Rosi features such as "Salvatore Guiliano" (1962) or "Hands Over The City" (1963), or an obscure item like "Il Monaco" (1972), Piccioni demonstrates a high "level of innovation" with "color of the instruments" yielding an "integrity of the instrumental music". Had Piccioni music such as this ever surfaced in a Clint Eastwood movie, Piccioni might be praised in the same breath as Jerry Fielding and Lalo Schifrin.

Fans of Ennio Morricone may wonder why none of his music received coverage within this article while a few John Barry soundtracks did. There's more innovation and color in Morricone's 1975 "Moses" (released March 2011 on the Legend label) than within "The Knack", for instance.

Speaking of the Italian Legend label, they released in May 2011 what is likely to be the most comprehensive version of "The Bible" by Toshiro Mayuzumi that will ever exist. "The Bible" was initially released on vinyl record in 1966, plus it also received an Academy Award nomination for best score. This 2-CD Legend album, with its 2+ hour duration, triples the amount of music! Certainly a release like this deserves a review. Although the Legend album has variable sound quality culled from different sources, it's nevertheless important in presenting the entirety of Mayuzumi's large musical canvas. Lengthy passages (which were never on the original LP) showcase much more of Mayuzumi's impressionistic and dissonant music than ever before. Tracks such as "Forbidden Fruit" and "Banishment From The Garden" demonstrate masterly incorporation of 12-tone techniques into the musical fabric.

With no shortage of innovation and integrity within this "Bible", one is not sure why it is absent (like many others) from this overview…

While agreeing with your overall focus, Mr. Rucki, that the finest film music compositions occurred during the 1950s, 1960s, & 1970s, I'm interested in learning about why a number of soundtrack albums released during 2011 (which contain scores from these decades) fail to appear on your list regarding the criteria you've specified.

The title of the blog is explicit enough: it's a selection. It's not exhaustive at all. A selection is subjective—and sometimes, elitist: notice the taste for Schifrin and Herrmann—, and relies on biases (like knowing the film, the decade, the composer or the music department, the musical leaning, enjoying the samples). It also reflects how you feel at an exact moment and it is an introspective and cerebral affair in the very end. Besides, you can't buy them all: it's economic and a choice. On the whole, I'd like to have an overview of a year in vintage soundtracks. I am very fond of vintage Hollywood but I'm not a completist on all composers. Even, a composer whose work and continuity I admire can write an uninteresting piece during an exciting era. It's very uneven due to the nature of the profession. Keep in mind there were many conventional or dull scores during "these" three decades.

My copy of Legend/GDM disc has yet to arrive It is certainly one of the highlights of the year for me I have seen the film for Hands Over the City and loved what music was used in it. Seems strange that Francesco Rosi has mentioned how much he enjoys listening to the lp of Piccioni's score but at the time he was making the film he must have decided to leave a lot of it off.

Makes me wonder if these other two scores are mentioned as complete on this disc really are all the music that Piccioni composed for them.

Jim, you'd better not lose much more time buying HARRY IN YOUR POCKET. It's sold out at Quartet Records.

It wasn't a "must buy" for me, though I will be getting the DVD--it's the same price--seeing as my listening habits for film scores is largely enjoying the music within the context of the film. Old fashioned but contrarian as hell, yet I just prefer hearing the music that way.

Good to see your reviews, Thomas. There was very little feedback on the appropriate thread about KILLER BY NIGHT when it was first released, and that kind of surprised me because I know that Quincy Jones is hugely loved. I'm a sort of instinct buyer anyway, so I don't NEED people to tell me that something is good before I place an order, but you've helped to make me push this to the top of the "to order" list. Quincy Jones was a master of innovative modernistic mood scoring, which is a facet often overlooked when we tend to focus on the funk factor alone. And the Johnny Williams won't be ignored either.